It’s Okay For Entrepreneurs To Take Time Off

I’m from Wisconsin and many people do fun things this week like visit the lake, go camping and all kinds of fun things with family and friends.

The weather doesn’t always cooperate, but this weekend it looks to be just about perfect – Sunny & 80+ degrees.

My wife and I are taking off this afternoon for a weekend at the lake with my parents and my brother and his girlfriend. We’ll do some golfing and putting around in the pontoon for a while just soaking in some rays.

Trouble With Taking Time Off

My wife and I both have our own businesses and we’ve kind of struggled with the mental aspect of taking time off.

It’s one of the supposed perks of working for yourself that you can set your own schedule.

But there is this weird feeling that when you’re taking time off that you’re hurting your business and yourself as a result.

I feel that it’s different from when I had a full-time job. Then you don’t feel bad. You have a set amount of time you can take off usually and there really aren’t any bad feelings about taking it.

But that time is defined when you’re the owner and in charge. So you feel differently about it.

Then there is another side of it that makes taking time off difficult because a business can depend on you to function. If you take time off the business has to take time off.

And even if you take time off the incoming work might not stop and you’ll just have to make up 3 days of work somewhere next week if you take 3 days off this weekend.

Embracing Time Off As An Entrepreneur

Recently I’ve recognized that feeling bad about taking time off as an entrepreneur is silly. I recognize that it’s healthy to take time off from work. If you’re on all the time you’ll easily get burned out no matter what you’re doing even if your work is your passion.

So the first step for me was accepting that vacations and time off are a good thing. They’re beneficial for you and your business.

That lifted a big load off my shoulders just telling myself that it was okay to take time off. I tried to stop feeling bad about it and it seems to have worked.

The next step was to figure out how to take time off without simply having the work pile up when you get back. Because if that happens you won’t enjoy the vacation.

It’s different for every business, but for me it was about delegating more tasks. I’ve slowly done that at GBW, but have accelerated it more the last few months at GBW and it’s been good for my mind.

Not only do I have more time, but I have more energy to give. I can think better and think about important business things that I don’t have time to work on when I’m dug in with the day-to-day work.

That work is important, but there is a limit one person can handle. So you have to figure out how to make it so that others can do it. And it has to be a way for multiple people to potentially do it since each person will reach a point when it’s too much at some point.

Final Thought

So I’m going on a little long weekend vacation this weekend and I’m feeling good about it. GBW will continue to operate just fine. I don’t feel bad about it. And I actually feel good about it because I know that I’ll be able to recharge my batteries and come back feeling good.

And it looks like I shouldn’t have more than a normal workload next week.

If you’re struggling with the idea of taking time off as an entrepreneur hopefully you can take those simple steps to getting back on the right track.